(from Craft: A Memoir forthcoming from Marsh Hawk Press)
It was 2008, and I’d just finished reading from my first book of poems, The Lama’s English Lessons, at Schlafly Bottleworks in St. Louis. I stood with my back pressed against the bar as the next reader took the stage. A member of the audience, a young man who looked to be in his early twenties, walked over.
He said he enjoyed my poems. Then he asked, “What advice do you have for a writer who’s just starting out?”
I’d been teaching undergraduate and graduate student poets at Columbia College Chicago for nearly ten years already. I was comfortable in my professorial identity. Dispensing writing advice is an integral part of the job. But right now, as I leaned against a bar in St. Louis, I found myself trying to offer guidance to a younger writer outside the four walls of the classroom, beyond the comfortable boundaries of the fifteen-week semester and the three-hour class session, far removed from curriculum plans and assigned texts. I feared that if I said the wrong thing, I might derail his fledgling writing career. This feeling that I had the power to disrupt another writer’s career trajectory was a result of bravado on my part; at the time, I worried that my first book of poems might either be panned or, worse, ignored. Deep down, I wasn’t confident I could offer any meaningful reply to his question.
I had no more than a few minutes to respond before the next reader began. She was situating herself at the microphone and I didn’t want to be rude and hold a conversation with someone else while she was reading.
“Be stubborn,” I blurted out. The words came to me spontaneously. I’d never before encouraged a student to consider obstinacy as a poetics.
My father was the most obstinate man I’d ever met. I loved him immensely, yet his stubbornness strained his relationship with my mother and, at times, with my siblings and me. Even so, I unconsciously absorbed his obstinance into my own personality, which, no surprise, sometimes made it difficult for me to sustain friendships and relationships. I had driven alone to St. Louis for the reading. I didn’t realize it yet, but my first marriage was on the verge of ending, and my stubborn personality played no small role in the breakup.
Still, I repeated, “You really just have to be stubborn.”
He looked at me strangely, as if disappointed that I hadn’t talked about, for instance, my writing process or my strategy for submitting work to journals and presses. I realized I should say more, and that I had to do it quickly so that I could hear the next reader.
“You need to have a persistent belief in the power of your imagination, a faith in your creative process that runs so deep that you’re too stubborn to give up.”
“That’s all? You have to believe you’re a good writer. That’s it.”
I nodded.
“But everyone feels this way.”
“You don’t want to believe in your work when it’s no good,” I added, leaning forward, lowering my voice as the writer on stage thanked the reading series curators and the brewery. I could feel a soliloquy coming on. A friend of mine once said the reason Nathaniel Hawthorne is one of my favorite writers is that, like him, I talk in paragraphs.
I tried to be brief so that we could both hear the next reader.
“You want to believe in yourself so much that when obstacles get in the way, like rejections from editors, you can stubbornly persist anyway. You don’t want to be so obstinate that you ignore editors when they say a piece of writing isn’t ready to be published. By ‘stubborn,’ I mean that you believe in yourself so much that when you get rejection after rejection after rejection, which happens to almost every writer, you don’t lose your commitment to making your writing better.”
He took a step backward. He was either considering the merits of what I was saying, or he had decided to just put some distance between us and end the conversation. “Stubbornness” was not what I’d expected to say, nor, it seemed, was it within the realm of writerly advice he’d expected to hear.
“It’s hard enough being an artist in a utilitarian culture that doesn’t really value what we make or do,” I added. “You don’t want to make things worse by allowing the outside world to destroy your belief that your own imaginative labor can make you a better writer.”
Another awkward pause. Then he asked me to sign his copy of the book.
I kept thinking about this conversation during the five-hour drive back to Chicago the next day. I couldn’t figure out why I reached for “stubbornness” in response to this audience member who clearly had put forth the kind of fundamental question that is a typical feature of question-and-answer sessions with audiences at the end of readings.
In such situations, you’re usually asked about how to submit individual poems or essays to literary journals, how to put together a full manuscript and where to send manuscripts, how to find the discipline required to complete a full-length book, and so on—all manner of pragmatic, nuts-and-bolts questions that emerging writers, naturally, want answered. Looking back now, one of the reasons I went straight for the more esoteric answer was, simply, that I’m not convinced that good writing advice can emerge from the kind of one-size-fits-all environment of the usual post-reading question-and-answer session.
I was still relatively new to the publishing world, and my primary concern that night in St. Louis was for the poems from my new book to connect with an audience. But even then, I was suspicious of the expectation I’d seen so often from my fellow audience members at readings that if you asked the right question, in just the right way, the writer would deliver a bullet-point list of how-to advice that, like a magic spell, would launch your writing career. In hindsight, I don’t think the person who asked me “What advice do you have for a writer who’s just starting out?” was looking for an easy fix. But I felt this way back then—and, worse, I didn’t believe I had quite enough experience yet to give him a satisfying answer.
Instead of taking a pragmatic approach to his query, I responded with something orphic, as if I were pointing to the word “stubborn” in the middle of a poem and asking him to hold the word up to the light and turn it in multiple angles of vision to see just how many refracted meanings he could come up with. I wondered if his hesitance, especially his long pause before asking me to sign the book, was an indication that I had disappointed him. I truly wanted to answer his question, but my altruistic intent was far removed from what became its confusing impact. At the same time, I felt—and still do—that I gave him a valuable answer.
I still believed in my response, in the value of writerly stubbornness, but as I drove home, I tried to figure out why stubbornness had been so squarely on my mind the previous evening after the reading.
I remembered something one of my percussion teachers, Dave Robinson, said to me back in my early twenties. Dave was the drummer for The Numbers Band, an avant-blues group with an enormous Midwest following. They were the house band at JBs, in Kent, Ohio, where I was an undergraduate student at Kent State University. Dave and I were discussing a particularly complicated, alternating-accent triplet beat that had taken weeks for me to master. For this lesson, I proudly showed off a modified version of the beat—a simpler, stripped-down variation that fit a new song that my band, Incline, was working on. I played my version for him then scanned his face for the wry, crooked smile that always told me I had impressed my teacher.
“What you played works fine,” he said eventually. “It’s steady and it has a dynamic pattern. Good variation. But it doesn’t sing like the original version we’ve been working on.”
I straightened myself in the chair. I’d expected unconditional approval and was surprised that I felt the need to defend myself.
“I like how my version fits the song we’re writing. It comes off a little less pretentious than the original beat you played for me. Like you always say, I don’t want to just show off my chops on stage.”
At that time in my life, what held me back the most as a musician was that I absolutely wanted nothing more than to demonstrate virtuosity on stage, even if this came at the expense of the songs themselves. Dave, as my drum teacher, knew this better than anyone.
“But when you really think about it, nothing’s more pretentious than assuming other people want to come to a club and pay a cover charge to hear you play music,” he said. “We all need to feel ‘pretentious’ just to get on stage at all. Just to assume an audience cares enough to want to see you play. Even when you’re having a bad day, you have to go into a show with the total expectation that you’re talented enough for people to think they’re going to have a good time watching you perform.”
He was right, of course. As I recalled Dave’s remarks on my drive home from St. Louis, I realized the extent to which I’d absorbed his peculiar—but useful—redefinition of “pretentious.” We’re often taught that pretension is a character flaw, the result of an overweening, and unearned, belief in one’s talent and importance. But Dave helped me see a flip side to pretension. In his reformulation, the word felt more like an honorable form of audacity. How audacious to think that an audience wanted to go to a club and pay to see my band perform songs we’d written and rehearsed in our moldy basement studio. But without such audacity, it would be too easy to surrender to the fear that I might fail, that an audience would leave one of our shows regretting they’d come in the first place. Wasn’t stubbornness, then, just a variation of the kind of pretension and audacity that allows you to believe you have something to say—and believe other people want to hear it?
Stubbornness is a complicated personality trait, especially for someone like myself who grew up watching my father’s stubbornness alienate his family. Stubbornness can quell the fear that we have nothing to say, but it also can be a manifestation of insecurity. When I doubt myself, I tend to talk over, or ignore, the opposing viewpoints of others. Digging in my heels is often a manifestation of uncertainty, of wanting to (stubbornly) control a situation that could become chaotic. As vital as it is to believe in yourself, an inflated self-regard can be nothing but narcissism.
But even though pretension and stubbornness can be nothing but bluster, they also can provide the extra spark of confidence to propel you to make art. If not for a stubborn belief in the importance of your work, you might never leave that moldy basement studio and perform. Art is, at its core, a mode of communication with others, and sometimes it’s only stubbornness and pretension that allow us to share our work with an audience—that prevent us from talking only to ourselves.
Tony Trigilio’s recent books are Craft: A Memoir (forthcoming, 2023) and Proof Something Happened (2021), both from Marsh Hawk Press, and Ghosts of the Upper Floor (BlazeVOX [books], 2019). His Selected Poems was published in Guatemala in 2018 by Editorial Poe (translated by Bony Hernández). He teaches at Columbia College Chicago.